Bimagrumab

“He later held leadership roles at several biotechnology companies, including Versanis Bio, where he led the development of Bima before the company was acquired by Eli Lilly.”

“Okay. So how did you guys discover Bima? How did you create it? So again, the earliest biology was done by Chris Liu's team in the Pathways group at Novartis Institutes.”

“Yeah. Yeah. So let's get back. You get Bima into the primates. Yes. And how does it how does it perform? Well, in order to do toxicology studies, you have to know how much to give them and how long it's going to last and what it's doing.”

“In the case of Bima, because we were thinking older adults, these were older healthy volunteers and people in whom we would be able to measure some of the effects of Bima, we hoped.”

“So there's some things you always do, like a set of standard blood tests. But in the case of Bima, we were assessing people's muscle mass and strength. This is almost archaeology at this point, thinking of what we measured, but we would have measured muscle mass.”

“and so forth. Did you see any adverse effects in the phase one? Yes. So the three adverse effects that are evident with Bima that we think are on target and that were assessed in that study were muscle spasms or cramps.”

“Probably. Like, here's a great example, right? Yeah. Like Bima could have been more of a hit if maybe, and maybe not, but a drug like that could have been a hit had it been appreciated that, oh, by the way, like you actually have to kind of do something to reap the benefits.”

“Remember, there's four combination arms. Yep. Right? There's low dose Bima, high-dose Bima, low-dose SEMA, high-dose SEMA, four combinations, and then placebo. And we saw the dose effects in all the arms. So that was good.”

“Well, Lloyd, this has been great. This has been kind of a wonderful education on drug discovery using, I think, a very interesting drug in Bima as a case study for the complexity and the nuance of the process.”